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DNC amps up fundraising

Jordan Kaplan, who has helped raise money for President Barack Obama going back to his Senate campaign, is the new finance director of the Democratic National Committee, which is ramping up its post-election fundraising with events featuring Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Kaplan, 34, joined Obama’s political world in March 2004 for the Senate campaign, where Kaplan was Downstate Illinois director and co-national finance director. Then in 2007, he helped raise initial capital for the first presidential campaign, where he was Greater Illinois finance director. He also was finance director of Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago mayor campaign, then raised more than $22 million as Illinois finance director of the 2012 campaign.

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Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the DNC chair, calls the appointment of Kaplan, who will work with DNC Finance Chairman Henry Muñoz, “a clear demonstration of the type of top quality talent and reach in the donor world that the DNC has been able to attract.”

“Jordan Kaplan goes back as far as anyone could go in President Obama’s world — within days of [Robert] Gibbs and Tommy Vietor — and has really deep roots in the Obama donor community,” Schultz said in a phone interview.

Kaplan, who has moved to Washington and will head a staff of about 30, has hired several young people to help turn young Obama voters into donors. Kaplan said his other priorities include a return to thanking people, which he said Obama “was adamant about” back in 2004.

“I think just because we got so big in ‘07 and ‘08, we kind of tended to get away from that a little bit,” Kaplan said in an interview in his office. “So we are working on that again. We are getting back to making sure that donors don’t feel that we don’t call them every time we want money, but we call them to engage them on different things.”

Obama is headlining half a dozen events for the DNC in coming months, including an April 4 brunch and photo reception in the San Francisco Bay area ($32,400 a person), followed 90 minutes later by a lunch that starts at $1,000 ($5,000 for the photo reception).

Ahead of Sunday’s cutoff for first-quarter fundraising reports, Biden sent an email to supporters saying: “Your support today will help build our organization at the grassroots level and will help develop new tools that will allow us to compete in elections during the years to come.”